


Promises Kept

by dilangley



Series: get a life (you first) [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 08:32:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18687877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: Steve Rogers has more than one promise to keep, and he is not going home alone. Not this time.





	Promises Kept

**Author's Note:**

> No beta. Forgive me my typos.

_“I’ll miss you.”_

_Peggy kissed the words onto Steve’s cheek, and he squeezed her hand. All these years he had dreamed of holding her again. It lived up to its own hype. If he had broken all the rules of time travel for this moment, it was worth it. They had danced to soft jazz, shoes squeaking along to the beat, and he had told her too much of the future that lay ahead of her._

_“I’ve always missed you,” he said._

_The goodbye ached in his stomach, but he never considered not saying it. He had more than one promise to keep._

 

\-------------------

 

**Vormir: 6th planet in the Helgentar System**

**The center of celestial existence**

 

\---------------------

 

To call it a planet gave it too much credit. Steve stared at the barren, purple landscape, all indefinite swirls and stark cliffs. He stared down at the Soul Stone in his hand. All of the others had been tucked back into their proper places in time, but this one had required a different approach. As he walked to the mountainside, he marveled at Clint’s accuracy. The archer had simply scribbled in the margin beside his sketch:

_Nothing. The bad kind._

It described Vormir well.

Clint had said little of the ordeal endured here, but Steve had gleaned more than mere story from the silence. A part of Clint had died here, and he would have traded himself for Natasha Romanoff if she had only given him a chance. The problem for him had been that the only thing Black Widow could not do was surrender, not once her mind was made up.

The vanished had experienced the agonizing, desolate five years as a mere instant. Only the survivors had lived its every pain. Natasha had endured that only to buy herself a one-way ticket to a distant planet.

Steve could only see it this way: Natasha had traded herself for the whole world, and even that was not price enough for her life.

Not for him.

A shadowy figure stood at the base of an ascending staircase. Steve opened his mouth to speak but was silenced.

“You seek what you already possess. The altar is empty,” Red Skull said.

Amidst this cosmic world, he seemed so separate from the humanity he had once had. Red Skull’s voice held resignation and purpose in equal measure, as if he had been shaped too powerfully to retain the hatred once owed a mere mortal nemesis.

Steve lifted the stone. “I’m no seeker.”

“You cannot lie to me, Steve Rogers, son of Sarah and Joseph.” Disdain leaked through the ethereal calm. “Captain America. Everyone who comes to this place is searching.”

“I’m just bringing the stone back where it belongs.”

“Good.”

Up the winding steps, trailing in the footprints of Red Skull, Steve struggled against the heavy atmosphere. As he reached the top, he waited for something to happen. Nothing did. He walked to the edge and peeked over. Poised there, he imagined his old enemy pushing him to his doom, but when he looked back, Red Skull stood serene.

“I…” Steve fumbled uncharacteristically as the nothingness here swallowed his planned eloquence.

“The soul stone exacts its terrible payment there at the edge. A soul for a soul is exchanged there.”

Steve found his voice. “I am here to give the stone back. What happens to the sacrifice?”

“No one would know that. The stone has never been returned.”

With a flick of his wrist, Steve tossed one of the most powerful items in the cosmos into an abyss.

  


\-------------------

 

**The Soul Stone**

**Unknown Astral Plane**

 

\---------------------

  


Perhaps he had missed her more than he knew, for when he saw her, standing in the shallow purple water, his stomach lurched. Here in a realm beyond the physical, he saw her as she had been in another time: bright red bob floating around her face and leather bomber jacket around her shoulders. No faded braid and clunky Quantum suit here.

“Steve.” She tilted her head to her left and measured him. Her mouth twisted. “Not you.”

Realizing her confusion, he shook his head. “No. Not me.”

The relief on her face washed over him like water in the desert. “Did we win?”

Perhaps the triumph had arrived burnt and singed, but arrive it had. He nodded.

“We lost Tony.”

Natasha closed her eyes for a second, compartmentalizing that pain and sadness until another time.  “And me.”

How those words could hurt, even with her right in front of him now, astounded him. If he had not become some sort of tongue-tied fool, he could have told her the simple truth that her death had changed everything.

In a post-snap world, where all hope should have been dusted and home should have been an ancient concept long forgotten, he had never been lost because she had been there, at his side, the truest of friends and allies. Without her, he might have ceased to be.

And now, once again on the other side of a great war, he needed her there for all the old-fashioned morals he believed in to seem real.

“About that,” he kicked a boot in the water and reached out, “Give me your hand.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I think,” he added as she closed her hand on his and everything swirled to darkness.

  


\-------------------

 

**Vormir**

 

\-------------------

 

“What the hell?” Natasha stared over the edge of the cliff, glanced back at Steve. Her hand still had his; he curled his fingers to hold it back.

“I’m returning the stones.” Finally, his brain had reconnected to his mouth, rust and dust falling off the gears of his mind. He looked at her.

“Okay.”

“I respect your sacrifice,” he began. Her mouth quirked,  the coming sarcastic comment practically visible, but he kept on. This was important. “You chose to die so that Clint could be reunited with his family. You laid down your life for him, and the world was saved. You were always a hero, and you never owed anything you had not given already, but now I hope you believe your ledger is clear.”

Natasha stood with an assassin’s stillness.

“You’re dead. Bruce explained it to me a hundred times why we can’t bring Tony back to life. I don’t understand it all, alternate timelines and time loops. I don’t think you can go back.”

Her face still betrayed nothing. She knew him well enough to know he was not done speaking.

“But Bruce said I could take as long as I needed to return the stones. Time here doesn’t affect time there. I can do what I need to do. Whatever that is.”

“You got a point in all this?”

“I have a stupid plan Bucky and I drew up on a cocktail napkin that involves an apartment in Brooklyn in 1945 and as much lost time as I want to make up for. I’m getting a life. Tony’s suggestion.”

In a timeline defined by moments of truth, he faced another right now. To lie would be so easy. He could frame this as a fresh start for her, a chance for her to try a new life in a new place, and leave himself out of it entirely, as if their two lives in 1945 would be incidental, separate. It would be wrong to lie.

But if he told her what he wanted, it might shape her answer. 

Once she had told him she could be whoever another person wanted her to be and had extended him an offer. He had chosen her as a friend. This time, it could be her choice. It would be wrong to take that away too.

“I want you to come with me. Maybe you get a little bit of life too, now that you’re dead.” He cracked a smile he did not yet feel.

“The world is safe?”

He nodded. “It won’t even know I’m gone. We can’t hurt it from here.”

She scrutinized him. When she finally spoke, her mouth barely moved from its straight line. “Wasn’t the bikini invented in the 1940s?”

“I don’t know.”

She half-smiled too. “Let’s find out.”

**Author's Note:**

> So this stupid thing would not stop itching at me. I could never get it written the way I liked, but honestly, I think I just needed to write it into being so I could write some of the fluffy oneshots I intend to write of 1940s Romanorogers. Because, dude, that is the only thing I will accept. Steve Rogers would not want some alternate timeline version of Peggy. He's not that kind of guy. Real thing or nothing.
> 
> Time travel always makes such a mess.


End file.
